OK. So after telling me how long something is - after all its crookedness has been flattened out - when are you going to tell me how crooked it is?

Huh? That was the bees in your bonnet.

So you keep avoiding my question of how you would actually measure crookedness. Is there any way other than comparing it to what it is most directly not?

You keep trying to shoe-horn your jargon-ridden metaphysics in where it doesn't belong. — darthbarracuda

Yeah. Look at all this talk about naturalistic fallacies and false dichotomies. Who knows what these crazy folk are talking about. Why can't they speak plain english.

And like I've said several times now and you've conveniently ignored, the experience machine thought experiment basically elucidates the core of axiology - welfare. Not some abstract entropic neo-scientific Taoist b.s. — darthbarracuda

Are you deliberately spouting gobbledegook now to make some clever point? It's all way over my head.

We all recognize that no value exists in the real world. — darthbarracuda

But ... but ... but ... I just said that is exactly the only place any valuation is taking place.

Why are you not familiar with things like depressive realism, terror management theory, or observed repression techniques? — darthbarracuda

Goodness gracious. All this jargon I'm meant to know.

...rant continues in same vein... — darthbarracuda

Zzzzzzzzz....

So how are you measuring crookedness? You have thrown away the notion of its converse - the ideal of the perfectly straight. What now? Talk me through your solution. What is this better tool that doesn't base itself on the ideal of the perfectly straight?

I explained that I would object to using a straight ruler to measure a crooked object. — Metaphysician Undercover

Is a crooked object one that is not straight in your view? If so, you have just defined it in contrast to straightness. You are claiming to have measured some degree of departure from the ideal.

But please, if you are measuring crookedness in some other fashion, explain away.

How are you defining naturalistic fallacy? The original version was the claim that what feels good is what is good. And clearly that isn't what I argue in any way.

Your version is "what nature does is what is good". But I don't see that as a fallacy. And also as I say, that is because I don't believe in "goodness" in the usual transcendental fashion. It is the Platonic belief that "the good" is some objective quality that I reject - and so any version of the notion has to be naturalistic and immanent in my metaphysics.

If you ask me what is the good, I would have to say look to nature and see what it is doing. It seems to like entropification but also negenentropic stucture (as you can't have one without the other in fact). It seems to like homeostatic enduring balances (as what else could exist?).

So we can look to nature and see its basic necessary logic when it comes to the question of Being. And clearly my naturalism doesn't attach any superfluous human valuation to what nature "likes" - even as it does turn the metaphysical conversation around to now grant existence its own "mind" in terms of formal and final purpose.

So the difference between our perspectives is that I say Being has to be a story of hierarchically-organised structural constraints on material freedoms. That simply is the definition of Being.

And within that metaphysics, talk of non-Being makes no sense. It wasn't an alternative possibility. If there is Being, the only alternative (the state from which things begun) would be the everythingness of disorganised possibility - a Vagueness, Firstness, Apeiron or Chaos, to use the various technical metaphysical terms.

Well you can in fact have non-Being as a finality. Where existence is all ending up is in the crisp emptiness of a Heat Death universe. An utterly generic structure with utterly reduced freedoms. So nature is heading there - and we would call that "good" if we were still trying to play your game of applying transcendental valuations to a tale of immanent self-organisation.

But clearly, that isn't how I would think about the good. My argument is that - naturalistically - the good itself is going to be a dichotomy. So that is why it makes some naturalistic sense that both negentropy and entropy feel good to us humans...and also feel bad.

We are surfing a wave of entropification. It is exhilarating to carve out shapes on a crashing wall of water. And so that seems a metaphor to me for how to live life.

But you refuse to engage with that other way of looking at things. You insist that you can start apart from nature and judge it transcendentally. You can focus on suffering and burdens and every other thing that already takes your own notion of the good as its reference point, so as to justify the claim that living is irretrievably shit.

None of what you argue rings true to my science-informed view even though I can see why you would say it.

For example, it is no surprise that "consciousness" - that is attentional level processing - seems to be full of the negative. Attention is what is reserved for dealing with the uncertain, the unstable, the threatening, the unsolved. So if you focus on what mostly catches your attention while living, mostly it is another problem to solve walking in through the door.

Yet psychology will tell you that most of life is lived as a matter or habit or automaticism. Like an iceberg, the bulk of life is assimilated smoothly with barely making a ripple. That is, if we are well-adjusted. Life just flows and suffering or effort feels minimal.

So that is why I keep referring you to positive psychology. It diagnoses the facts of the mind correctly. There is a natural way that things are meant to work. And your obsessing on a pessimistic "philosophy" that might justify a lack of fit and flow is not going to help.

Sure, I agree that the world isn't perfect and actually does have some deep issues that require critical thought. I continually point out the clash that has arisen between a humanity adapted to live at the pace of the daily solar flux and our recent switch to a life predicated on blowing up fossil fuels instead. Humanity has adjusted rather too successfully to blowing up the planet. We have a real life problem and it is quite right to step back and question that (especially if you have kids to be concerned about).

So my objection to your pessimism is that it is not just shallow metaphysics but an actual distraction from facing the realities of nature. You can't fight global warming if you have some pollyannish view that what humans are doing in wanting to surf this really collossal wave is somehow unnatural, so everyone is suddenly just going to come to their senses and fix things for the environment.

Again, you are fighting battles that are already out of date because the response follows on a generation after the emergence of the new possibility.

Romanticism was the natural reaction to the Enlightenment. Existentialism was the natural reaction to Industrialisation. Even anti-natalism is some kind of delayed reaction ... kill me now as I reject your relentless Consumerist affirmation of life as an exponential trajectory of entropy production.

Philosophy, if it is to be any real use, has to be more up with the play than that. But then that's the power of the transcendental romantic tradition I guess. It is its own thing, sitting in a dark corner and thinking up ever more extravagant ways to complain.

What jargon were you struggling with exactly in the bit you quoted?

But given your rhetorical strategy is to keep tooting "naturalistic fallacy", there's not much to say. One is either a immanent naturalist or a transcendent romantic on these issues. You've made your choice. You believe the mind stands apart from its own conditions of being. You are not interested in being part of nature. Well fine.

Crikey. That's nothing like how Kerr explained it. He said his metric was a mathematical description of a flat space containing a spinning object. Those were the two parameters that finally popped out as the solution to an appropriate simplification of the general equations. But hey, what do these "experts" know, eh?

I feel like responding to you is exactly like chucking information down a black hole. The maximum entropy condition applies. Understanding is bent until no light could ever escape the perfect orb of denial.

But first we must figure out why the straight ruler is not giving an accurate measurement. — Metaphysician Undercover

So you don't think GR might help with that? Or do you accept the calculation of geodesics - only not in the vicinity of a black hole for some reason?

the straight ruler wont tell you why the thing you are trying to measure is crooked — Metaphysician Undercover

Except GR is telling you why your (Newtonian) ruler has a limit to its crookedness. The metric might curve, but it it can't be more curved than the surface of a sphere. A sphere is absolutely crooked - crookedness gone to its equilibrium limit. Talk of things being rounder than a circle is unphysical craziness.

And GR also defines the opposing limit of non-Euclidean curvature in saying that rulers could be bent hyperbolically the other way. Kind of like a white hole. Or the "inside" of inflation. That again is a limit-based argument. You can't diverge any faster than at an exponential rate. Crookedness in both directions has its geometric limits.

So a straight ruler has to live in an actually flat world - perfectly poised for no particular reason between the hyperspheric and hyperbolic limits on curvature. Or else we accept it bends with its world due to the world's gravitational contents, but we have ways of factoring that energetic out of our measurements. We know how to make relativistic corrrections so we can treat the world as if it met our demands to just be flat ... and its material contents don't make a difference to that.

But I'm not the one complaining about the fact there exists a whole world out there where people talk funny.

So, the intent of your whole account is not to represent reality? Has the " implied need for realism, completeness, faithfulness. etc." "dropped out' of it? — John

That's a good point. I was talking about the biological level of neural modelling. And that is much more strictly pragmatic. Animals really are locked into a practical relationship with their environments.

Humans - though the development of words and numbers - have shifted to a far more abstract and philosophical relation with existence ... apparently.

But then the counter to that is check out what we mostly actually do and it is still pragmatic. We are simply learning to see our environment in a way that gives us greater technological control. We are imagining the world as a set of concealed sources of energy and material that can be redirected to fulfill our general (entropic) desires. So a colonial settler arrives in a new country and sees immediately forests that could be fields, hills that could be forts.

And yes, I would be quixotic perhaps in wanting to step back from all that practical activity to try to see its reality - stand outside of it to make sense of it ... knowing it is still just another exercise in mapping perhaps.

But there are reasons to think that it is not just a new level of arbitrary mapping. Reality is turning out to have mathematical or Platonic strength irreducibles. That is how I regard the metaphysics of Peircean semiosis. It captures the fundamental causal logic of existence. And so what begins as mere epistemology becomes the ontological hypothesis being empirically explored.

So semiosis starts as a model of human psychology. And it turns out (the reason I got involved) to be precisely how biology now understands the causal logic of living systems. Then the next step after that is to see that even the new science of dissipative structures (all that stuff that used to be classified as the new maths of fractals, chaos, complexity and self-organisation) is accounted for causally by the rational machinery of semiotics.

Thus semiosis is of course just another metaphysical map. But also it could prove to be the ultimate mapping in being the one that arrives at the mathematical limits of abstract conception.

Yet even if that is so, you could say that knowing this is itself not particularly pragmatic. How does it help to know why the Universe must exist in the form that it does? What use is that information to a biological creature really?

It is like why venture into outer space? You can't breathe there. Ultimately it is quite pointless - a distraction from your job of living a life down here on Earth.

But to get back to philosophy of mind, the semiotic perspective is instead a corrective in that it does bring you down to Earth in fact.

It says that the famous explanatory gap - why is "what it is like" actually what it is like, and not something else? - is a failure of proper pragmatism. It is a mistake to think that this is the kind of thing science should be able to explain. Explanations are there to serve purposes, and so can only deal with differences that make a difference - the actually counterfactual. In Wittgensteinian fashion, if red qualia could be inverted as blue qualia - and it would be impossible to stand at any viewpoint where the difference might show - then it is simply muddled conception to claim to be troubled by a difference that cannot make a difference.

So the thread illustrates that. All the talk about what colour a wavelength is really. All that matters to a modelling mind is the fact that wavelengths are discriminable in a way that has direct ecological validity.

So what should drop out of a science of the mind, or even a metaphysics of the mind, is this obsession with discovering what the "mind" really is. The fact that we even reify the process of being mindful as a noun - the mind - shows that already we are presuming a metaphysics of substantial objects. Instead, we should be in search of a process, and a process we can account for in the most metaphysically generic terms. My argument is that semiosis is turning out to be that generic model - a metaphysics of matter and sign rather than matter and mind.

Well, we differ in opinion clearly, because I think you will necessarily get a mistaken result if you start from the premise of the perfect symmetry, and work backward away from this, to describe something which is not a perfect symmetry. It's like starting from a false premise. — Metaphysician Undercover

I suppose on the same principle you object to rulers that pretend to be straight, and clocks that pretend to be regular.

It is physically impossible that they are, so we must simply throw all rulers and clocks away.

Or, you could just not use pleonastic terminology. — darthbarracuda

Or you could get used to the fact that academia uses technical language for the sake of precise thinking.

Not a flat earther, but a perfect circle denier. — Metaphysician Undercover

You latched on to a phrase in a way that shows you don't understand the physical argument. Relativity would model the gravitational curvature as perfectly spherical, yet the definition is still asymptotic - the approach to a limit.

So Kerr models the ideal final state in a way then allows the calculation of actual physical histories. We can start to talk about real black holes in terms of their more lumpy and haphazard story of getting crushed down in practice towards the simple ideal.

Just check out the variety of modelled "imperfections" that in practice would break the perfect symmetry the description of the absolute limit describes....

The Kerr geometry exhibits many noteworthy features: the maximal analytic extension includes a sequence of asymptotically flat exterior regions, each associated with an ergosphere, stationary limit surfaces, event horizons, Cauchy horizons, closed timelike curves, and a ring-shaped curvature singularity. The geodesic equation can be solved exactly in closed form. In addition to two Killing vector fields (corresponding to time translation and axisymmetry), the Kerr geometry admits a remarkable Killing tensor. There is a pair of principal null congruences (one ingoing and one outgoing). The Weyl tensor is algebraically special, in fact it has Petrov type D. The global structure is known. Topologically, the homotopy type of the Kerr spacetime can be simply characterized as a line with circles attached at each integer point.

Note that the Kerr geometry is unstable with regards to perturbations in the interior region. This instability means that although the Kerr metric is axis-symmetric, a black hole created through gravitational collapse may not be so.‹See TfD›[dubious – discuss] This instability also implies that many of the features of the Kerr geometry described above may not be present in such a black hole.‹See TfD›[dubious – discuss]

A surface on which light can orbit a black hole is called a photon sphere. The Kerr solution has infinitely many photon spheres, lying between an inner one and an outer one. In the nonrotating, Schwarzschild solution, with α=0, the inner and outer photon spheres degenerate, so that all the photons sphere occur at the same radius. The greater the spin of the black hole is, the farther from each other the inner and outer photon spheres move. A beam of light traveling in a direction opposite to the spin of the black hole will circularly orbit the hole at the outer photon sphere. A beam of light traveling in the same direction as the black hole's spin will circularly orbit at the inner photon sphere. Orbiting geodesics with some angular momentum perpendicular to the axis of rotation of the black hole will orbit on photon spheres between these two extremes. Because the space-time is rotating, such orbits exhibit a precession, since there is a shift in the {\displaystyle \phi \,} \phi \, variable after completing one period in the {\displaystyle \theta \,} \theta \, variable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerr_metric

Again, your jargon obfuscates your argument. — schopenhauer1

Don't blame me if you lack literacy and are too lazy even to google the unfamiliar.

Something I'm not quite following here is how you escape the charge of representationalism. — Moliere

I'm saying that the intent is not to re-present reality to the self - display sensory data so it can become the subject of experience. Instead the intent is to form a pragmatic modelling relarion with the world. So signs might mediate that, but the implied need for realism, completeness, faithfulness, etc, drops out.

In reality, the physical difference between green and red wavelengths is nothing more but a slight variation in wavelengths. But the mind sees two absolutely opposed things. Red and green can't mix as far as experience is concerned. So the mind is introducing a completely fake boundary into its view of the world. It is certainly not representing the continuous variation of the same thing - radiation - in constructing a model where a binary difference is what gets represented ... even when the physical display, as with the strawberries, doesn't emit any red.

And we can understand that from the way maps don't have to recreate territories. They just have to tell a tale of critical actions we would take at certain points in a history of motions. That is how they become a model - a model of our interaction with the world, not a model of the world as such, and so that is how a self arises. The self is the thing of the model representing some state of "selfish" intentionality in representing a set of critical actions.

So the mentality becomes the fact of a coordination between a body and a world. The sensory display is not a picture awaiting interpretation, it is the act of interpretation or mediation itself.

I'm not so sure about that. What about other creatures? — Moliere

What about them? If I could look at the world through the eyes of a cat, I wouldn't expect to experience trichromatic vision. Just the same as I wouldn't through the eyes of a colour blind human.

It seems to me that the color-blind look at the same red in a different way — Moliere

They might look at the same wavelength energy in some sense, but we know that there is no counterfactual sensory judgement taking place, such that they see red and not green. And my argument is that experience is nothing but a concatenation of such base level acts of discrimination. Physical values have to be converted to symbolic values in which an antagonistic switching off a neural response is as telling as switching that response on. Now both 1 and 0 have meaning. Absence means as much as presence, whereas back in the real world, there is only the presence.

And why can't qualia only be perceived if one has both the right mind-stuff and the right body-stuff? What if the perception of qualia just is two proto-conscious bits on each side of the divide lining up? — Moliere

You are advocating Panpsychism it appears. For some reason the right wiring of a complex brain adds something different. The complexity of the patterns being woven lines up all the protoconsciousness to create not just bare mentality but mental content.

Yet that is still a mystical tale as the protoconsiousness remains itself rationally unexplained and beyond empirical demonstration. From a theory point of view, it is a hypothesis is not even wrong.

I sometimes get to thinking that experience is sort of its own thing -- and that our minds are first collective, and second individual -- there is a pre-existing mind to our birth, one generated by the social interactions of our peoples (sort of like distributed cognition and extended mind, as one could conceive of the scientific project, but less structured or intentional or teleological), which in turn generates our sense of self (usually through a mixture institutions -- the family, the church, school, work), and an individual contact with this more general structure. — Moliere

I certainly agree that the self-conscious human mind is socially contructed. The ability to introspect in an egocentric way, rationalise in an explictly logical fashion, reconstruct an autobiographical past, etc, are language-based skills that we learn because they are expected of us by the cultures we get born into.

So that is part of the semiotic story. Adding a new level of code - words on top of the neurons and genes - allows for a whole new level of developmental complexity.

Qualia are perceptual qualities and so are a biological level of symbolisation. Even a chimp will experience red due to a similarity of the circuits. But only humans have the culture and language that makes it routine to be able to introspect and note the redness of redness. We can treat our brain responses as a running display which we then take a detached view of. Culture teaches us to see ourselves as selves...having ideas and impressions.

So the point then about the red strawberries is that there is also still the actual biological response that can't be changed just by talking about it differently. And this shows that the biological brain itself is already a kind of rationalising filter. We never see the physical energies of the world in any direct sense. The world has been transformed into some yes/no set of perceptual judgements from the outset. It is already a play of signs. And so the feeling of what it is like to be seeing red is somehow just as much a sign relatiion as the word "red" we might use to talk about it with other people.

If you are a physicalist, you want to somehow make redness a mental substance - a psychic ink. And if we are talking about colour speech, we are quite happy that this is simply a referential way of coordinating social activity or group understanding. The leap is to see perceptual level experience as also sign activity - a concatenation of judgements - not some faux material stuff.

The mind is a modelling relation with the world. And after all, it should feel like something to be in that kind of intimate functional relation, right?

It is your apparent attachment to "substance" that would be scientifically anachronistic here.

And yet the application of GR equations to cosmology immediately had the effect of predicting spacetime curvature so extreme that an event horizon must result. So the equations did exactly that - obliged us to posit ontologically real outcomes (of which black holes are one of many now empirically supported examples).

Is that really what information semantics claims? To me it seems the kind of semiotic, constraints-based, approach I've described.

So meaning is use. The utterance of "dog" stands as a sign mediating a habit of relation with the world. Thus while the vocal act is particular, it only has meaning by virtue of the coordination it might bring between a mind and the world (the world including other minds that might have an interest in being likewise oriented to the world beyond themselves).

You talk about mental particulars (concepts, ideas, impressions?) representing information. But informational semantics seems to be making the same point that they don't. What signs buy as the mediating mechanism is the possibility of an externalised habit of coordination rather than an internalised state of information.

So "dog" as a concept is not the representation of a doggy essence - something closed and internally represented - but instead the anchor of a habit of coordination between self and world. Doggyness characterises all we might do, think and say in a "doggy situation". So as a "concept" it is creatively open ended - while also being still usefully or pragmatically constrained enough to function as a lexical unit, a syntactic element, of some "propositional" sentence.

So what does that mean for your notion of the atomism of concepts. Are they informationally closed or open?

Uttering "dog" is an atomistic act. As a noise we might hear, we know its not someone saying log or bog or dig or dob. But as a concept, dog seems informationally open. We could either generalise or particularise its semantics by adding or subtracting information (or constraints).

Are we talking about a dog or the dog? The Platonically ideal canine, or that little mutt snapping at our ankles?

Atomism kind of works because we can leave the contexual information implied and unsaid. But that doesn't make word interpretations foundationally atomistic. It is of the essence of words that their boundaries of reference are porous or vague. Atomism is relative as semantics is essentially open even if syntax does try to create a closed compositional structure that is meant to keep all the meanings trapped securely inside the spoken sentence.

Brains are salient to individual identities in such a world, so it's not entirely off base to be looking at brains -- that would be one part of the physical-world, after all -- it's just not the whole picture, in accordance with this line of reasoning. — Moliere

But this is just being inconsistent - choosing dualism or some ill defined brain functionalism depending on which front you are currently mounting a defence.

The logic remains - if dualism is true and qualia are not brain dependent, then the blind should have at least imaginative access to those qualia, despite eyes that have never functioned in a way that would produce the right neural circuits. And you shouldn't be able to zap the V4 colour centre of the brain and produce then a loss of colour qualia as a consequence.

I can see how such language could be confusing. — Moliere

It'd be less confusing to say we prejudge on the whole. And still less confusing to say we positively predict. Conceptions are schemata, to make use of the good old fashioned cogsci borrowing from Kant. We have mental templates to which the world is already generally assimilated. Post hoc judgement is reserved then for where the schema prove to need tailoring.

My question is -- what does the brain do to reality to make the appearance? But the answer is "it makes the appearance appear like the appearance appears, different from reality" -- which just masks the mechanism I'm asking after. — Moliere

The way you phrase this again says you find it natural to think about the mind as representational - the cogsci paradigm which is being replaced by the enactive or ecological turn in psychology (or return, if we are talking gestalt dynamics and even the founding psychophysicists).

And that is my point about the paradigm shift represented by semiotics. Representationalism presumes that a stable reality can be stability pictured and so stabily experienced - begging a whole lot of questions about what could ever be the point of there being the observer essentially doing nothing but sitting and staring at a flickering parade of qualia painted like shadows on the cave wall.

But give that observer a job I say. Observation - defined in the general fashion of semiosis - is all about stabilising the critically unstable. So minds exist to give determination to the inherent uncertainty of the material world. If matter is a lump of clay, minds are there to shape it for some purpose.

And uncomfortable though it may seem, the science of quantum theory says observers are needed to "collapse" the inherent uncertainty of material nature all the way down. Existence is pan-semiotic.

Somehow we now have to honour that empirical fact in a way that makes Metaphysical sense. Most folk agree we can't claim that "consciousness" solved the quantum observer problem. But quantum foundationalism does think that some notion of information, contextualism and counterfactuality will do so - which is another way of talking about semiotics.

So I'm talking about a sweeping paradigm shift. The systems view is about how existence has to founded on the primal dynamism of material uncertainty becoming regulated by the sedimentation of informational constraints.

Heraclitus summed up the understanding already present in Greek metaphysics - existence is flux and logos in interaction.

And the mathematical exploration of what that could mean is still being cashed out, as with the return of bootstrap metaphysics in fundamental theory - https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170223-bootstrap-geometry-theory-space/

To try to make things clearer, the computational view does the regular atomistic thing of imagining existence to be based on some level of fundamental stabilty. So that is where computational models of mind go wrong - they expect the neural code to be some kind of simple compositional deal.

But semiotics - to boil it down - takes the opposite metaphysical position of basing everything on a presumption of fundamental instability (what folk used to call the edge of chaos, or criticality).

So top down regulative constraints work because the underlying material reality is exactly on the point between breaking down and reforming. It is poised in a condition of maximum instability. Which is how a little nudge, an infinitesimal push, can tip the physics one way or the other.

That explains how mental states - as systems of signs, habits of interpretance - can interact in ways that pragmatically connect with the goings on of the material world. The world is poised at its tipping point, not stuck in some undynamic rut from which it would be impossible to budge.

So that regulation of material instability is what semiotic theory can explain. That is its metaphysical paradigm in a nutshell.

In neuroscience, computationalism still dominates. Folk know neuron spikes are some kind of code. But generally, they don't then have a clear way of relating that to a coherent model as they are still thinking that the activity must be computational and so based on some ground of "hardware" stability.

Even in biology, the full force of a semiotic shift in thought is only just beginning. It is only in the last decade that biophysics has had the tools to actually view cellular processes at the level of the nanoscale molecular machinery.

Life is matter poised on the point of falling apart and yet nudged to keep going, continually reforming, by a (genetic) system of signs. Thus the organic can be defined in contrast to the mechanical in terms of this foundational thought - semiosis is the regulation of fundamental instability.

The structure and apparent motion of stars doesn't match what we're expecting given our gravitational model. Hence the need to invent black holes. — Terrapin Station

Ha. A paid up member of the flat earthers. It's only a rumour things disappear over the horizon because the world is curved.

That doesn't indicate that there is anything inherent within GR which would make you expect to find a black hole, it indicates that certain types of stars when understood under GR make you expect to find a black hole. — Metaphysician Undercover

Another flat earther. In 1915, Schwarzchild had already extracted the basic cosmological implication of general relativity being true. A dense enough lump of matter would have to produce the local curvature that would become a complete gravitational collapse. That comes directly out of the equations.

And it is one of the ironies of intellectual history that Roy Kerr announced his simplification of Einstein's equations that could account for a realistic solution for a spinning black hole at the very same conference called to discuss the discovery of quasars. Unlucky for Kerr, it took quite a few more years for it to be realised that quasars were the product of black holes. So at the conference many wandered off or catnapped as he gave what seemed like an obscure mathematical technical paper at the time.

Now of course astronomers are drumming up public money so they can take a "photograph" of Sagittarius A*, the super massive black hole at the centre of our own galaxy.

In the case of our brains the disharmony is fundamental. Inconsistencies arising in the lower brain directly threaten the very essence of our higher brains - rationality. — TheMadFool

The neuroscientists have looked. The answer is in. Everything works together fine on the whole. It is not unnatural to jerk your hand off a hot surface even if your spine seems a rather lowly level of thinking matter to grant such an important decision to. And I would rather be driven by a driver competent enough to be mindlessly negotiating the traffic with their mid brain habits rather than the nervous learner where the prefrontal is having to navigate a blizzard of unfamiliar sensations with uncertain results.

The biggest threat to rationality is in fact just badly trained habits of thought. Folk can latch on to an untested idea and feel a passionate conviction for it. They are indeed stuffed if they mistake that lower brain evaluation of their own competence at rationalisation as the truth of things.

'Snoopy' and 'dog' are independent atomic concept respectively. — quine

In what sense are either not composed of multiple instances of experience?

You might mean that words, to behave in "the right way" - act like a conjunctive arithmetic - would have to be treated as atomistic particulars ... even when they are actually general umbrella terms. But it is clear that being atomistic is not what word meanings actually are.

It's funny how he specifically targets pragmatism's affirmative approach, which is akin to apokrisis's theories on this thread. So as applied to apokrisis' view, his assumption of survival has already made his theory dead in the water, due to not questioning the very assumption of the argument to begin with. — schopenhauer1

Except you forget that my naturalism has been checked out all the way down. So I am happy to ask the question whether nature is natural. Why does life even exist if physical existence is mechanical and meaningless - as its entropic story appear to suggest? And that naturalism explains why negentropic structure is needed to allow entropification to occur. The basic unifying dynamic of existence has been exposed. And it turns out that the mechanical view was wrong. The cosmos itself is organic in being a semiotic dissapative structure.

Of course you can dispute that new metaphysics, argue with it as a theory. That is when we turn to the empirical evidence to see whose theory best explains what we observe.

And you know that I've made that argument often enough in terms of modern romantically striving western consumerist culture and the entropic desires of a bazillion barrels of buried, energy dense, fossil fuels.

So I am hardly guilty of affirmative bias - in either the guise of pollyannism or pessimism. Instead I'm quite happy being the scientist putting competing theories to the test. It just so happens that nature itself affirms its own immanent organicism - existence as the universal growth of "reasonableness".

What does it mean, exactly, when you say you start with a head full of every kind of possibility? — darthbarracuda

I hesitate to give the usual answer, but since you insist, I mean vague possibility. So a state of informational symmetry that could be broken a countable vast number of ways.

Possibility doesn't have to be an ensemble of distinct states like marked balls in a bag. Instead it can be a state or relatively unformed indistinctness out of which distinct possibilities are forced into counterfactual definiteness as the hand reaches in to grasp for some thing.

ou said "less is more", but in my opinion it should be "more is more" so long as efficiency and adaptability are maintained within some set threshold. — darthbarracuda

But I'm not the one trying to impose a monotonic dynamic on the discussion. I am simply trying to correct for that tendency to privilege bottom up construction in telling the story of nature. So I have no problem that there is both construction and constraint, each being fully expressed. That is in fact what full blooded holism demands.

And note how you make consciousness synonymous with in the moment attention. My definition of being mindful extends to include habitual level awareness. So that is the diachronic view of the holist. Memory, or the whole weight of a life of experience, is "doing" the "being conscious". We grow a close modelling fit for the world and so in the moment, only tiny tweaks need to be made to tat running state of mind. Again this is in complete contrast to computational thinking where every moment is a new state of information to be data processed so that it generates some mental representation.

So when I say less is more, I mean the fewer tweaks needed, the better the running model. The less attention needs to fix, the more powerful it becomes as it is being now very narrowly devoted to whatever turns out to be the remaining focus of uncertainty.

This actually shows up physically in comparative neurology. Chimps are smart, but we are smarter. So who do you think devotes more primary visual cortex to the tiny central focus of vision? It is because we are better at predicting the contents of our peripheral vision that we can justify devoting more neural resource to whatever needs to be the centre of our attention. Tunnel vision becomes wired in because we are more successful at ignoring the world in general.

Well in neuroscience it has led to this almost crazy obsession with the possibility that cells are talking to each other in codes of electrochemical pulses. I mean what are these guys smoking? ;)

This explains the seeming regularity of experience better than reference to an embodied organ which differs from person to person. — Moliere

So by your dualistic reasoning, every congenitally blind person ought to report imagining colours, every congenitally deaf person would still imagine noises, every teetotaller would still know the feeling of drunkenness, etc. After alll, something may be missing in terms of inputs to drive brain activity but we all partake in the one mind substance, right?

It could have been a bi-color, for all we can tell, and the tri-color vision just came along for the ride, or was sexually selected for, or was a random mutation and a seismic event wiped out those with bi-color vision. — Moliere

Well the usual speculative evolutionary story goes that mammals generallly did go bicolour or dichromatic and red-green colour blind because they were night creatures during the dinosaur era. Then primates added a pigment to allow for sharp red-green discrimination. And a reasonable reason for that was so they could spot ripe fruit in dense foliage. Which would happen to be a good example of evolving a sign detector to read the signs being made by other parts of nature.

Judgment is useful in non-social environments too, to be sure. Learning how to judge, and further how to make adjustments to said judgment, can reap many rewards. But I'd say that the structure of experience, as much as judgment plays a part in our behavior and functions, differs from this. — Moliere

So what does your "judgement" entail as a neurological concept? It does seem to imply a hard dualism of observer and observables. It does give primacy to acts of attentive deliberation where I am pointing out how much is being done automatically and habitually, leaving attention and puzzlement as little to do as is possible. So talk of judgement puts the emphasis in all the wrong places from my anticipatory modelling point of view. Just the fact that judgements follow the acts strikes another bum note if the impressions of present have already been generally conceived in the moment just prior.

Doesn't make sense. You must mean concepts can be combined but not decomposed. If concepts can be composed, then they would be composites. So you might be wanting to say that concepts are the atomistic, non-decomposable, units that can then be used to compose.

But atomism is disproven in physics now. And even in language use, it is clear that instead organisation and particularisation are created by contexts of constraint.

The word "dog" limits reference to a class of phenomenon fairly tightly. Talking of the brown dog restricts things even more.

So constraints can be combined reducing the freedom of the possible with any arbitrary degree of precision a situation might require. And there is an atomism of a kind in that composability. But concepts don't have to rigidly possess particular fixed properties as atomism implies. Instead they only need to restrict interpretations, and they don't even have to do that more than loosely much of the time.

The strawberry appears different to the viewer under different conditions. The scientist measures the same length of light coming from the strawberry under these various conditions. — dukkha

The disconnect is the other way around. We still think we see red even though there is now no actual "red" wavelength light being emitted.

So the brain corrects for the missing light by being able to imagine perceptually what the same scene would look like under ordinary light.

But the upshot is the same. The point is that the world has no colour anymore than a chemical has a taste or an air vibration has a noise. So if we are understanding the world in terms of neurally constructed qualia, then what kind of thing are they really?

My answer is we have to think of them as signs or symbols. Colours, noises, tastes and other qualia are encodings of physical energies.

Now most people don't take that as much of an answer. But it is not as if the physical energies are much less mysterious once we start to delve scientifically into the reality of material being. We soon discover that we haven't really shaken off our qualitative impressions of the world when we try to imagine light as little wriggly lines of something.

So the same applies to the mental side of the equation. Scientifically, a generalised theory of signs - that is, semiotics - is going to have to be the best way of making sense of phenomenal experience.

Yet I find it hard to believe that you were actually subconsciously predicting all these insane possibilities as you mentioned. — darthbarracuda

My point was the opposite. These were all things I could be consciously conjuring up, but then in fact I am effortless ignoring. Just being aware at a general background level of "being in my familiar room" is enough to suppress a vast amount of craziness.

In dreams, of course, we aren't plugged into a real setting and so the imagination does run riot in just that way. The lack of an ecological or situated state of mind means there is no organised state of constraint to suppress the perceptual invention.

Again, this goes back to the top down logic of systems, where the way things work is by the creating of states of constraint that narrow and shape degrees of freedom. So at any moment, it is possible I could be imagining anything. But the more I'm plugged into some actual place with its affordances and the kinds of things natural to the situation, the more constrained my state of mind will be.

So the contrast is with the input/output model of a computer where a vision of the world is thought to be constructed in jigsaw like fashion by the elaborate gluing together of a multitude of sensory data points. The view gets constructed by figuring out the details from the bottom up.

Instead now I start with a head full of every kind of possibility and start to limit that in a top down fashion so it is reasonably predictive of what is likely to happen next in terms of some flow of sensory elements. I generate the idea of the room from memory and so pretty instantly will notice anything that sharply deviates from my forward model of it.

I sort of suspected that Kant might come up, given the Kant-esque nature of cog-sci. — Moliere

Kant is a familiar reference point. But my argument is more properly Peircean or biosemiotic.

Colors would just be accidents, and I'd infer that they actually do look different for each of us, in the same way that we have different behaviors which result from various brain functions (behaviors which are products of judgment, at least -- not heart beats and such). — Moliere

Of course we can't compare our experiences to know that your red is my red. in that final analysis, there is a brute lack of counterfactuality that thus winds up in an explanatory gap. But quite a lot of telling comparisons can be made on the way to that ultimate impasse. So for instance everyone sees yellow as the brightest hue, and also doesn't see brown as the blackish yellow it really is. And that phenomenological commonality is explained in complete fashion by the known (rather jury-built) neurological detail of the visual pathways.

So in the end, our yellows might indeed be different as experiences. Yet we can track the story right down towards this final question mark and find that similar neuroscience is creating similar mental outcomes. Thus we are not getting a strong reason for the kind of doubt - the talk of the purely accidental - that you might want to introduce to motivate a philosophy of mind argument.

And that said beliefs about mental processes and a presumed sort of faith in emergence are what give these sorts of inferences from this image their persuasive "umph". — Moliere

I'm trying to be quite clear that talk of emergence is very much reductionist handwaving most of the time. It is taking the idea of physical phase transitions - the idea of properties like liquidity emerging as a collective behaviour at some critical energy scale - and treating consciousness as just another material change of that kind.

But I am arguing the exact opposite. I am saying there is a genuine "duality" in play. The brain is a semiotic organ and so it is all about a modelling relation based on the play of "unphysical" signs. So material physics isn't even seeing what is going on. No amount of such physics could ever produce anything like what the brain actually does by just adding more of the same and relying on some kind of collective magic.

Of course physics does self organise and that kind of emergence is a really important correction to physicalist ontology. But semiosis is yet another story on top of that again.

"stripping away the backdrop truth" -- because I'm rather uncertain that the backdrop truth is, well, actually true given its Kantian backdrop. — Moliere

Ah well. Forget any mention of Kant then. This is Peirce so "truth" is pragmatic. We have already shifted from requiring that the world be represented in some veridical fashion. We are now viewing cognition in the way modern neuroscience would recognise - modelling that is ecologically situated, coding which is sparse, perception that is only interested in the degree to which uncertainty can be pragmatically minimised.

Why does the eye only have three "colour" pigments when evolution could have given us as many as we liked? Less is more if you already have in mind the few critical things you need to be watching out for.

One such problem would be the over-emphasis on the power of judgment with respect to experience, as is revealed by such language as 'the brain talks to the ganglion' — Moliere

Neuroscience has a ton of more technical jargon. But it is a basic fact of neural design that every neuron has hundreds of times more connections feeding down from on high than it has inputs coming up from "the real world". So just looking at that anatomy tells you that your prevailing state of intention, expectation and memory has the upper hand in determining what you wind up thinking you are seeing.

If you know pretty much exactly what should happen in the next instant, you can pretty much ignore everything as it does happen a split second later. And thus you also become exquisitely attuned to any failures of the said state of prediction. You know what requires attentive effort in the next split second - the hasty reorientation of your conceptions that then, with luck, allow you to ignore completely what does happen after that as you have managed now to predict it was going to be the case.

So yes. This doesn't tally with the usual notions of how the mind should work. But that is because the phenomenology as we focus on it is naturally about all our constant failures to get predictions right. It seems that the homuncular "I" is always chasing the elusive truth of an ever surprising reality. However that introspective view by definition is only seeing things that way because there is such a bulk of events successfully discounted in every passing instant.

For example, in the second that just passed, I was effectively, subconsciously, predicting that Donald Trump was not about to barge into my room, an asteroid was not about to plough into the park outside my window, my foot wasn't about to explode in a shower of fireworks. So that is what brains do - allow us to discount a near infinite ensemble of possibilities as that which is almost infinitely unlikely.

In your terminology, that seems a hell of a lot of judgement in relation to a tiny fraction of experience. It is just that we don't really give much weight to how much we both routinely predict successfully, and also discount unthinkingly as too crazy to even consider (although we can pull them out conceptually at any time as I just did).

So again, that is why I stress this extra constraint of ecological validity. Philosophy of mind does have a habit of stripping it away as it searches atomistically for a foundation of qualia. Yet it is the pragmatic relation that a mind has with the world that is central to accounting for the mind causally.

It seems to me that if the strawberry images are not red, then there must be some means of determining this in reality, no? What means are those? — Moliere

Your argument exposes that this can't be about simple emergence via compositional interactions. But in talking about a digital pixel display - designed to fool the brain in that precise fashion - then it does start to seem that composition is somehow the right register of thought.

To simplify the story, we should think of the world simply having some wavelength peak of reflectance at some point of the environment. Let's call that X. And then from the get-go, the brain - speaking down at the very front line in the ganglion cells in the retina - are already making a more complex computation. They never see this X. They are already seeking a comparison with other (remembered) values. So X is being compared to Y. Or more generically (that is dichotomously, as in opponent channel processing) X is being compared to not-X.

So the situation is Kantian or semiotic from the neural get-go. We don't see X, the thing in itself. We are already into a response that is the sign representing the psychological "fact" of a contrast. We don't see some pixel scale strength dollop of some particular physical wavelength. We have already crossed the "epistemic cut" and are representing purely some difference that makes a difference - the experience of seeing X in terms of that meaning we are not seeing not-X. That is, we are seeing what we see in terms of an actual contrast with a remembered context or conception. Raw input has already been transformed into pure sign or signal at the first neurological step.

So now we have a story where ordinary visual judgements are made ecologically - we apply everything we know to interpret the scene. And this state of "best fit" conception acts all the way top down to frame our neural responses.

An isolated ganglion cell gets a ton of outside help to make up its mind. The wider brain can see that this is a plate of strawberries in a weird light. It shouts at the ganglion cells, that (using the chat about grey and teal pixels being used here) the grey or low level white actually should be understood as a relative absence of the dominating teal hue and so - by logical implication - a suppressed presence of redness.

The point again is that the brain never sees anything real directly. The world just doesn't have that kind of contextuality in which wavelength peak X is meaningfully an absence of every other wavelength possibility. That comparison - the one that turns a meaningless variation into a difference that makes a difference - depends entirely on the existence of the further thing of a memory-based comparison, a response by an observer who says that the facts have to be either a "this" or a "that". Either the world is X or not-X in terms of our private modelled realm of signs.

So what I am arguing against is any kind of colour realism. And talk of higher level emergence from the collective interactions of composite parts is still going to create the question of what colour are the pixels really.

Instead it is comparisons (counterfactual constraint or forced symmetry breakings) all the way down. Even grey is about the comparative absence and presence of "black" and "white".

This extends to talk about qualia. When we talk about the redness of red, we are repeating what is happening down at ground level on a grand scale. We are stripping away the levels and levels of conception or context that give the "computations" of the brain/mind their ecological validity. We are just saying pay attention to what it feels like to be "seeing red". And that strips away from qualia talk the backdrop truth that what is really going on is that we are (just as much) seeing a mental state of not-green (which more complexly is itself either a dominating presence of red wavelength light, or - another way to see not-green - a relative absence of blue-yellow channel activity).

Same old one note lament. You make the choice to view everything as pointless and whine on and on about it.

Yet life as normal people experience it is a mix of ups and downs. As I said, once you get into the lived complexity of our feelings about events and meanings, then you can start to see that what has most value is efforts in the name of purposes. It's a sad fact for you (as it destroys your excuse to whinge) but constructed meanings are fine. Why climb a mountain? Well it hurts in a way that is fun. Who cares if a pessimistic neuroscientist says that is an endorphic delusion.

But I'm wasting my breath. The way you have constructed the meaning for your own life is that it utterly lacks purpose. So every effort or action is a harm and a pain. Congratulations for adopting such a dull one note socially constructed idea. You may have biological level depression. So your personal umwelt may chime with this one-noteness you want to claim as existentially universal. But I am happy to get on with a more complex level of ethical analysis when talking philosophically about the human condition.

Are we sure that this is the work of our lower brains? — TheMadFool

I'm giving the simplified version, but it is like a short circuiting as you said. The lower emotional areas are involved in normal speech acts, giving the felt tone and emphasis. But a sudden startled response is a reflexive response - a quick physiological reorientation to get prepared while the more complex analysis by the higher brain starts trying to catch up.

So normally everything would work together in smoother fashion. But when things are surprising, we get a quick flush of emotional "getting ready" in a fifth of a second, followed by the full attentional analysis after half a second. And in that time we have yelped or sworn, as well as jumped or tensed and started to focus our attention.

The way to think about it is that we need to react to the world as fast as possible. So the brain is set up to start with a quick and dirty emergency response - shit, something's happening. Then a split second later, the more considered analysis can kick in.

Thus the lower brain is about quick simple habits. The higher brain is about creative and considered plan making. And they work in combination, but with slightly different inherent speeds.

I shall focus on verbal responses as indicators of our state of mind while experiencing shocking events. — TheMadFool

There is a prosaic answer. A "lower brain" area - the cingulate cortex - is responsible for expressive vocalisation in social animals. So chimps hoot and howl in an "emotional" fashion using this bit of brain. Then human speech built levels of more abstract motor planning - capable of supporting syntactical speech acts - above this.

So when we get a jolt of adrenaline, the cingulate kicks in with the rote expletives. Instead of just howling, we exclaim god damn or holy shit. But the reasons are the same.

In the same way reading words like fuck create a cingulate level shock. Bad language leaps out and catches us at that more basic emotional valuing level.

The religious, sexual or scatalogical connotations of the words is a learnt association. The cingulate just wants to make a noise, and what comes out most naturally is any language that has that association to its job of evaluating shocking things even before the higher brain can turn around and focus its full attention.

The point is that you want to found your position on the transcendental subject. Good luck with the pure solipsism that ensues.